Microsoft Publicly Betas ID Lifecycle Management

Microsoft Publicly Betas ID Lifecycle Management

At its Tech-Ed for Professionals summit, being held in Florida this week,
Microsoft unveiled the first public beta version of Identity Lifecycle Manager
2.

This product will handle the entire identity life cycle, from provisioning
new users to deployment to termination.

It provides a much-needed solution in the Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) space in
enterprises, but whether or not it's acceptable by enterprises remains to be
seen, because it will enable end users to manage their own identities, which
raises security issues.

It will have a "powerful set of self-service capabilities for the end user
and a suite of rich administrative tools and enhanced automation for IT
professionals," Leland added.

ILM2 will also have automated portals based on .NET frameworks and
application programming interfaces (APIs) (define).
The APIs will be based on Web Services
standards

Being user-centric is "significant for Microsoft," Leland said. The goal is
to put users in control of the management of their identities and access
privileges using Microsoft Windows and Office, "providing a consistent and
familiar interface in a privacy-friendly way," he added.

There will be no problem with supporting Windows XP, "because we support
down-level as well" but "obviously you will get significant benefits as you
move to Vista," Leland said.

The user-centric approach puts Microsoft in the lead because "the state of
the art is not providing meaningful tools for end users to manage their own
profiles and entitlements," Leland said.

"They say that, in listening to customers, they've identified a major flaw
with other identity management products, in that users don't have self service
capabilities," Mann told InternetNews.com.

"That's not correct; we delegate the managing of identity and passwords to
end users, and this feature's in our shipping product now."

Microsoft's user-centric approach worries Kevin Kampmann, a senior analyst
at The Burton Group. "The concept is interesting, but there are still issues
around interoperability and putting mechanisms in place that make it viable,"
he told InternetNews.com.

"Does the user want to do this?" he added. "And there's a whole issue of
trust on the enterprise side that needs to be dealt with."

CA has got that angle covered: Earlier this week, it unveiled
Security Compliance Manager and a slew of other products with identity
management features.

Security Compliance Manager lets managers certify and attest to the access
rights a user has. "A user can ask for access rights, but can't get them
without certification or approval by a manager," Mann said. "It's just like
when an executive asks for a corporate credit card, there's no way he'll get it
without a manager's approval."

CA's identity management products also control access based on a user's role
in the corporation. For example, finance department staff won't be able to get
access to engineering applications and vice versa. "There's control at the
outset and there's also a control chain," Mann said.

ILM2 will let enterprises manage multiple credential types -- passwords,
identity certificates, smart cards and
one time password devices, which will "provide significant cost savings and
advantages in terms of security because you get an end to end view," Leland
said.

It provides a user interface for creating workflows and policies. This lets
users "select, drag, drop and create sophisticated workflows and policies
through portals," and allows policies to manage both Windows and non-Windows
environments, Leland said.

The public beta of ILM2 shows that Microsoft is "getting serious about
identity management in terms of the ability to provide a consistent management
framework for identity information," Burton Group's Kampmann said.

Advertiser Disclosure:
Some of the products that appear on this site are from companies from which QuinStreet receives compensation. This compensation may impact how and where products appear on this site including, for example, the order in which they appear. QuinStreet does not include all companies or all types of products available in the marketplace.

Thanks for your registration, follow us on our social networks to keep up-to-date